Said sociology professor Wang Feng, an expert in China’s demographics, quoted in "China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis/Deaths outnumbered births last year for the first time in six decades. Experts see major implications for China, its economy and the world" (NYT).
What happens when people don't want children?
“I can’t bear the responsibility for giving birth to a life,” said Luna Zhu, 28, who lives in Beijing with her husband. Both their parents would be willing to take care of grandchildren, and she works for a state-owned enterprise that offers a good maternity leave package. Still, Ms. Zhu is not interested in motherhood....
Beijing has offered a range of incentives to couples and small families to encourage them to have children, including cash handouts, tax cuts and even property concessions....
Rachel Zhang, a 33-year-old photographer in Beijing, decided before she married her husband that they would not have children. The couple have embraced a lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids,” a shorthand for couples in China who have decided to remain childless....
“I am firm about this,” Ms. Zhang said. “I have never had the desire to have children all along.”
China got people not to have children. Just turn it around. Make them have children. It's not so easy!
We have the same problem of population collapse, and what are we doing? We're not making it easier to afford to have children. We're not romanticizing the nuclear family. We're not preventing young people from checking out early. We are, some of us, trying to stop abortion, and we are, some of us, trying to keep those who want to migrate.
It's interesting that the NYT talks about "motherhood" and quotes Chinese women. What about the men? Is this article focused on women's choices because out of respect for women's reproductive freedom or because we necessarily look to women to fulfill the duty to produce children?
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62 comments:
No mention of China’s One Child policy by anyone but the population ‘problem’ is not enough incentive? To procreate?
Humanity wins the Darwin Award- Best Species Category…
Go preach to the ‘we all have to eat bugs’ people…
“Double Income, No Kids,” a shorthand for couples in China who have decided to remain childless.
The New York Times wrote this?! Double Income No Kids is the longhand. The shorthand is "DINK" and it's been around for decades. It has nothing to do with China or the Chinese.
The Chinese diaspora is huge, with Chinese immigrants making up sizable minority in many countries around the world; especially in North America. How will China's demographic problems will effect this? Will war break out as the government loses control, over-whelming the rest of us with a refugee crisis of epic proportions? Will China lure these people back home, damaging our fast food industry, reversing our real estate bubble, and who knows how many other parts of the economy propped up by Chinese people and money?
28 or 33 are both Too Old, to START thinking about having kids..
If you don't start having kids by the time you're 30.. You're PROBABLY not going to have kids..
DUH!
Aren't there any 19 year old girls in China? Oh, that's right!! They ABORTED them all
DUH!!
There's 2 (or three) guys, for Every girl.. WHY would a thinking gal tie herself down with kids?
We have the same problem of population collapse, and what are we doing? We're not making it easier to afford to have children. We're not romanticizing the nuclear family
Nope!
instead, we're ENCOURAGING girls to sterilize themselves with "puberty blockers" (chemical castration)
This is not unique to China and isn't really a China story.
With rising incomes most people have fewer children. See Italy and most of Western Europe. See Japan. See S. Korea. See Russia and Eastern Europe. Before the industrial revolution of the 19th Century (coal, steam, oil; concurrent medical advances), the majority of children were born to the relatively wealthy. This is why most people of European descent have a king or several in their ancestry. Lower and middle income people away from farms could not afford children then either, and a very very large percentage of all children died young.
With incessant Green and overpopulation (1 Child) messaging people feel no guilt or feel that fewer children is the responsible thing to do.
The global population mushroomed dramatically from 1B in 1800 to 8-9B today. This growth rate truly is not sustainable unless we can terraform the Moon, Mars, and Venus in a few years:
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
If we keep pumping out as many babies as in the 20th Century, more and more areas will become ever larger cookie-cutter mega cities and some will be mega slums. "You are not special, Snowflake."
Nobody wants to live in these “utopias” that lefties are always imposing on people.
World War III will be fought between armies of geriatrics, as young men and women will be in short supply, and far too valuable to risk on the front lines.
You get more of what you subsidize, less of what you tax.
As a society, China instituted limits on childbirth- and then only boys were acceptable- for years. They finally stopped it, but now they have too many young men, and many cannot get adequate work. They cannot attract a wife, let alone afford a family, home, etc. The limits on child births, and accepting only boys was the catalyst for their problem now: Billions of people entering middle and senior years. Productivity will be plummeting. They'll need to import youth from other nations.
Western nations have spent years mocking the nuclear family, praising the single parent, mocking those who don't want abortion, and praising those who get multiple abortions. We've also spent years denigrating boys and men. Drugging the boys. Ignoring them in school for a preference to calling on the girls. Today young women graduate, go to college, get advanced degrees. Boys are barely finishing high school. So in the younger ages, you have schooled, degreed professional women. That was the plan and it worked. But the men have been left behind and they are not appealing to these accomplished women.
Add in the rise in cultish gay wanabees, trans wanabees, and those who proclaim- with joy- that they don't even want sex, and you have a recipe for a generation falling well behind replacement rate.
It'll take a lot of screwing in the next generation to make up for the current ones.
A good many young adults believe the earth is in imminent peril due to climate change. Why have kids when there’s no future? Same thinking was prevalent during the Cold War.
There's been a sea change. Almost no one has large families. Perhaps it will evolve further from large families to small families to no families.....Maybe the people who are developing sex robots can also develop toddler robots to replace small dogs. Nothing against small dogs, but you have to walk them in all kinds of inclement weather and they sometimes leaves messes. Toddler robots would be more hygienic and less trouble to care for than terriers. I'm all for toddler robots, provided precious resources are not taken away from the development of sex robots. This should be our first priority.
Thank you for your comments. We are choosing, person-by-person, to slowly die out. It is "Children of Men," [P. D. James] not by some unknown external agent, but by individual choices.
Nevertheless, I think that an unborn generation will see this mass anomie and choose to take on the responsibilities and joys of life and we will move forward.
Without illegal immigration the American population would also be falling.
Abortion eventually will be illegal just as a form of conscription. Let women do their part in return for the benefits of society just as the men have to.
Population of China: 1.412 billion
People who don't want kids probably shouldn't have them.
“Double Income, No Kids,” a shorthand for couples in China who have decided to remain childless.
The New York Times wrote this?! Double Income No Kids is the longhand. The shorthand is "DINK" and it's been around for decades. It has nothing to do with China or the Chinese.
I so want to make a "Chinese Income, No Kids" joke...
The last time China saw more deaths than births was when Mao's policies killed millions upon millions of Chinese. That method of demographic change is still available to today's Chinese Communist Party. Don't be too surprised if burdensome elderly suddenly find themselves sent for re-education in the countryside rice farms, until they aren't a problem any more because they are dead.
Lower-class Chinese men are the new illegal immigrant wave in America. Masses of them, especially in NYC. No hope at home; isolated and poor, so stupid educated liberal women here are unreachable. Someone computer-savvy should start a matchmaking website. How do you think all that food got delivered during Covid? NYC will not release the statistics.
Then there are the visa students. 10% of all admissions in many elite schools. They're not going home. OK, but why can't we discuss this honestly?
CCCP (Communist Russia) had the same problem... who want's to bring children into a slave society.
It usually takes 70 or so years for a communist country to fall. China went Communist in 1949. As you can see it has been just over 70 years!!!!
Let China DIE from inside.
It's bigger than just the Climate change and anti-breeder sentiment. It's even bigger than the anti-nuclear family sentiment, but that is at the root of the problem. Society ahs pushed the idealized form of self-centeredness. Live for yourself, do what you want, be what you want. It's the idea that self-actualization is the key to happiness. It is the belief that there are more than two genders, that any relationship is as valid as any other, that possessions, prestige and career are important, that being a mother is shameful and a waste of a person's talent. Cash incentives will not replace deep social status. Until we make parenthood great again, this goes for fatherhood as well, then we will continue to diminish.
The goal of central planners isn't to solve problems, it's to be central planners.
Do they actually believe they can get control ofchaos if only they had the power to enforce a few more rules and regulations? Click on the double pendula image.
From one-child to selective-child delegated by the State through ethical sanction of the wicked solution and dysfunctional orientations.
Labor and environmental arbitrage. Redistributive change schemes including shared responsibility through progressive prices.
Immigration reform in lieu of emigration reform to mitigate progress and collateral damage at both ends of the bridge and throughout.
Keep women affordable, available, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence aborted, cannibalized, sequestered in darkness (e.g. ethical religion, class-disordered ideology, political congruence).
Deny women and men's dignity and agency, and normalize human life as negotiable commodities (i.e. DIE).
India passes China this year, maybe as soon as April. Already every age group below 30 much larger. 2064 population projected to be almost 50 per cent larger. I suppose conquest of Taiwan would change that somewhat.
Do they actually believe they can get control ofchaos if only they had the power
A tale of mortal gods and goddesses, deplorables and "burdens". Of governing regimes that range from individual to authoritarian. Principals matter. Principles matter.
More propaganda favoring population growth. There are over 1,400 million Chinese. They aren't going to run out of them.
‘If we keep pumping out as many babies as in the 20th Century, more and more areas will become ever larger cookie-cutter mega cities and some will be mega slums. "You are not special, Snowflake."”
But that isn’t going to happen. The Chinese population is rapidly aging, and has already aged out of the age where kids are produced. It is facing a population crash of epic proportions. India is likely to follow, but not as quickly, because they didn’t have the One Child Policy that China did. The places in this world that still have significant population growth are the poorest: sub Saharan Africa and some of the more fundamentalist parts of the Muslim world, where reproduction is still seen as a religious necessity. When the population urbanizes, and people leave the countryside for the cities, kids become an expense, and are no longer profitable. Everything else seems to descend from that.
"We're not romanticizing the nuclear family."
That's one way to put it. Another is to say that the culture war has aimed to undermine the nuclear family for decades.
Down with the patriarchy! Motherhood is oppression! Abortion is the rightful exercise of autonomy! SSM is a constitutional right! Single mothers deserve respect and benefits! There's nothing wrong with them! Nuclear families breed inequality! It's not fair!
Strong and flourishing nuclear families stand in the way of the prog project.
Not saying that accounts by itself for low birth rates.
I had a prof in library school whose comment about abortion and birth control was, "There's plenty more where they come from."
For a while recently, there was talk about the converging crises of COVID, War, and trade disruption leading to starvation across much of Africa and Asia. That talk seems to have slacked off, and in some cases the dire predictions have been pushed out to next winter.
IMHO we don't have too many people per se, we only have too many of certain people.
There's 2 (or three) guys, for Every girl.
TIL China is the new Surf City.
Can anyone answer this question: If most jobs will soon be done by AI, robots and other automation, why is population reduction such a threat?
Enigma said...
This is not unique to China and isn't really a China story.
With rising incomes most people have fewer children. See Italy and most of Western Europe. See Japan. See S. Korea. See Russia and Eastern Europe.
The bolded part does not seem to apply south of the Sahara. The future of humanity belongs to sub-Saharan Africans. And Indians, to a smaller degree, as their birthrates fall and their population growth levels off.
Peter Zeihan has been saying the same - China shot itself in the foot with its kill-the-unborn program.
"The future belongs to those that have babies."
That would be Niger with a TFR of 6.6. Almost all the countries with strongly positive (above 2.1) fertility rates are in sub-Sahara Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
tim maguire,
Exactly my first thought. I first ran across "DINK" in one of John Mortimer's Rumpole stories, maybe thirty years ago. The speaker was a Timson (Rumpole readers will know what I mean) who had made it all the way up to stock trading, and after saying he was part of a DINK, he added that now he was a YID -- Young Indictable Dealer. "Except that isn't really funny, is it?" Of course the guy had been set up. Timsons are almost always being set up.
Another factor that is new is that Chinese girls are marrying non-Han Chinese men. This would have been unthinkable a generation ago. This tends to make it even harder for Chinese men to find a mate. Most of this is occurring outside of China but it is not all among expatriates. Two of my daughter's friends were a young Caucasian man who spent several years teaching English in China and one of his students, a young woman who moved in with him in Shanghai, followed him when he moved back to the US for graduate school and who announced at my daughter's wedding reception that she planned to be next. One of my medical students was from China. She was married to a Caucasian man from South America. She came to an American medical school so she could care for her parents, she told me. Her mother was a professor in China but pensions were poor.
"The future belongs to those who show up for it." - Mark Steyn. My wife and I have 7 children. My parents have 35 grandchildren. People think its a cultural thing (I grew up in Utah), but we did it because we love being part of a big family. I think that desire is latent in many of us, and as a society we'll come back to it eventually.
Those burgeoning Sub-Saharan populations can explode only as long as the rest of the world is willing to feed them. The same could be said for Egypt for that matter.
I'm still of Naipaul's opinion that Africa has no future.
@Ann: "What happens when people don't want children? "
That is asking almost the right question.
Humanity is facing a completely unprecedented evolutionary problem: What happens if the female of the species has both the desire and ability to control her fertility?
If women, on average, satiate their maternal cravings at something less than two* children, then absent force, we will be self-extincting.
*The replacement fertility rate is often cited as 2.1. That means, on average, each woman has to have slightly more than two children to have one daughter, who repeats the cycle.
That is fine for WEIRD countries, but the likelihood of dying before reaching 24 is more than three times as high for Africa as in America and Western Europe. The world average is about twice as high as North America.
I'm not a demographer, but it seems to me that a heck of a lot more countries are below replacement than the UN and similar groups have taken on board.
I've read from several people, some of whom I respect, that the world, especially China, is facing a "demographic crisis" that will be catastrophic.
I can see the numbers, but I ain't buying. It seems like something that societies will adjust to rather easily over time.
But it makes good copy and sells books like all good scare stories.
Europe's population dropped by a third after the Black Plague, and who benefitted? The peasant classes. Population growth benefits business *owners*, land *owners*, and governments who skim off the other two and who want warm bodies for their armies. The rest of us benefit by limited population growth, more freed up land, food is easier to grow, less pollution, higher wages, etc...
Not romanticizing the nuclear family? Yet so many Gen Z types are still living with their parents, well into their twenties and beyond. For them, life becomes an extended adolescence -- find yourself!, stay in school!, don't get tied down!, experience widely!, take up yoga! Not a way of living that puts much value on taking responsibility. Pajama-boy of election campaigns past came to mind. When twenty-somethings are living that life, perhaps it becomes hard to see oneself as a parent.
There's 2 (or three) guys, for Every girl..
I think that was the opening line from Jan and Dean's new postgender album!
“Deaths outnumbered births last year for the first time in six decades."
At least now they get to die of old age instead of starvation.
Religion is the elephant in the room when it comes to demographic decline. Demographic decline is religious decline. https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-fecundity-of-faith/
Demographic decline is mostly explained by religious decline. https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-fecundity-of-faith/
@Rabel: I've read from several people, some of whom I respect, that the world, especially China, is facing a "demographic crisis" that will be catastrophic.
Maybe not exactly catastrophic. But over the next fifty years, countries such as Italy, Japan, S Korea and China will face population losses that haven't been seen outside of severe plague, famine or extended war: Italy to 43M from 58M, Japan 87M from 158M, S Korea 34M from 52M, China 1B from 1.4B. Those are losses that range from 20% to 40% over the period.
And all the while, average ages are skyrocketing.
Assuming that societies will adjust to this easily seems like whistling past the graveyard.
The issue is not more or less, and quality does not have an intrinsic value. The issue is to avoid the deep recessions, even depressions, that follow with mismanagement (e.g. DIE, one-child, selective-child, class-disordered ideologies). The market, without single/central/monopolistic interventions, has demonstrated the best performance to smooth evolutionary processes (i.e. chaos). In the meantime, promote fitness, discourage dysfunction, penalized wicked solutions.
The interesting thing to me is how, like the Soviets before them, the Communist Chinese, despite having the ability to outlaw abortion and contraception, are ideologically unable to take those measures, and so are stuck trying to give people incentives to have kids instead.
This was obvious decades ago. I had a debate in college about why overpopulation didn't exist and the big problem of the 21st century would be falling population and its impact on economic growth.
That was me, a completely undistinguished and not-as-smart-as-I-thought-I-was student and a nowhere school.
If I could figure it out, why is it so hard to get people to see the obvious? Fewer people means that less work is done. Natural resources don't use themselves, and don't matter until people use them. In a way, they don't even exist until we discover a use for them and a way to collect them. People are the only resource that ultimately matters.
Having children has long been a very concrete measure of overall optimism about one's society. There is a last-gasp strategy of not having children but believing one has figured out a late strategy for succeeding during the downfall personally and cashing in.
I am about to turn 70. I just described my college graduating class, and sadly, most of the girls I dated, now a very successful but bitter and angry group. (I meant the class. The GF's were marginally better.)
Related to this topic, I've been reading The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, by Peter Zeihan, a geographer and demographer who formerly worked for the geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor. The Zeihan book, published 6/22, says that the long period of stability created by post-1947 Pax Americana is coming to an end, and that with the end of the US security guarantee, globalism will dramatically decline. He also claims that declining birth rates will upend Chinese and other societies (e.g., all of Western Europe other than France) that are built on a Ponzi scheme pyramid predicated on young workers paying for the old. He makes globalism look like something that we will greatly miss when it has gone. Lots of poverty and nastiness will emerge in the post-globalist world. As is typical of Stratfor guys, Zeihan ignores the role of culture, sees the world basically as a board game, and doesn't explain how exactly NATO and such are going to collapse.
China will get dead before it gets rich - or - Does 70+ years of Communism/socialism destroy the will to exist?
I hope the pro-natalists here are doing their parts.
My wife and I, by mutual agreement, are one and done, and I am not ashamed.
The problem is that historically population has been a pyramid with a broad base (children) and a small top (elderly). China is looking at a reversed pyramid, and with the revelation they over-counted their population, the lost people are those from 1980 on, the One Child Policy years, who are also those who are in the child bearing generations.
China is missing the people they need to create a replacement generation. They are going to shrink while still being per capita poor, and all without a war, famine, plague, or genocide.
Everyone should know the demographic regime that they and their contemporaries are creating by their reproductive choices. If your generation chooses in substantial numbers not to have children, your demographic regime will be that of Birth Collapse: well-off when you're young and poor when you're old. In fact, this is the current demographic regime and it's already playing out in China. China combined a one-child policy with abortion/infanticide of girl babies. Now there aren't enough women in China to prevent the Birth Collapse demographic regime even if the women wanted to marry into families in which they are not valued as compared to the men and in which their daughters will be aborted.
Still, in the US, young people who want to avoid the worst of the Birth Collapse can do so by making mothers feel valued for the homes they build and the children they have. When the welfare state goes under, such families will survive. Meanwhile, those who expect to survive old age on the earnings of other people's children after deliberately having no children of their own are in for a sad and shocking time. There's no future in that plan.
Earth did just fine with half its current population.
The main problem will be getting the Africans to stop breeding.
I came across DINK as a marketing segmentation term in the 80's. I thought they were the end state for Young Urban Professionals (Yuppies). As I recall DINK's supposedly wanted small luxury condominiums in areas with good restaurants. They wereindifferent to school quality. They were supposed to revitalize urban centers.
China got people not to have children. Just turn it around. Make them have children. It's not so easy!
The main problem is that once you end up with a society where most parents only have one child, you end up with a society where parents pour a LOT of resources in that child so the child can get ahead in life.
Unless you're super-rich, having two children means shorting both kids, compared to the families with only one kid.
So people who want kids still can't afford to have many kids.
And if you're on the borderline, you can have a MUCH nicer life if you're pouring those resources into yourselves, instead of into your kid.
And since "the State" is going to take care of you in old age, not your kids, there's no real payback to justify the expense.
We have the same problem of population collapse, and what are we doing? We're not making it easier to afford to have children. We're not romanticizing the nuclear family. We're not preventing young people from checking out early. We are, some of us, trying to stop abortion, and we are, some of us, trying to keep those who want to migrate.
In pretty much every single one of those issues, it's the Left that's driving the US towards more population collapse
Bunkypotatohead said...
Earth did just fine with half its current population.
Humanity didn't. 1/2 our current population was 1973.
You want 1973 levels of technology?
High tech requires a big population, to produce all the different things that go into making that high tech.
You want current failures made better? Then you need a growing economy, that produces a growing surplus, that can be used to pay to fix problems.
Zero or negative growth sucks
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